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'Frisian' languages are a closely related group of Germanic languages, spoken by about half a million members of Frisian ethnic groups, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. Frisian languages are the most closely related living European languages to Old English, but modern English and Frisian are mostly unintelligible to each other. It has been asserted that fishermen from Great Yarmouth could understand fishers from Harlingen in Friesland. There are similarities to both Dutch, as many Frisian words are borrowed from Dutch, and Danish, as Danish speakers are able to understand some spoken Frisian. Additional shared linguistic characteristics between the Great Yarmouth area, Friesland, and Denmark are likely to have resulted from the close trading relationship these areas maintained during the centuries-long Hanseatic League of the Late Middle Ages.

Contents

Division

Speakers

Status

History

Old Frisian

Middle Frisian

Family tree

See also

External links

Division

There are three varieties of Frisian: West Frisian, Saterland Frisian, and North Frisian. Some linguists consider these three varieties, despite their mutual unintelligibility, to be dialects of one single Frisian language, while others consider them to be three separate languages, as do their speakers. Of the three, the North Frisian language especially is further segmented into several strongly diverse dialects. Stadsfries is a mixed language (West Frisian mixed with Dutch). Frisian is called ''Frysk'' in West Frisian, ''Fräisch'' in Saterland Frisian, and ''Frasch'', ''Fresk'', ''Freesk'', and ''Friisk'' in the dialects of North Frisian.
The situation in the Dutch province of Groningen is more complex: The local Low Saxon dialect of Gronings is a mixture of Frisian and Low Saxon dialects, though it is believed that Frisian was spoken here at one time and has been gradually replaced by the town language of Groningen City, which in turn is now being replaced by standard Dutch.

Speakers

Most Frisian speakers live in the Netherlands, primarily in the province of Friesland, since 1997 officially using its West Frisian name of Fryslân, where the number of native speakers is about 350,000. An increasing number of Dutch native speakers in the province of Friesland are able to speak the language. In Germany, there are about 2,000 speakers of Saterland Frisian in the Saterland region of Lower Saxony; the Saterland's marshy fringe areas have long protected Frisian speech there from pressure by the surrounding Low German and standard German.
In the Nordfriesland (North Frisia) region of the German province of Schleswig-Holstein, there are 10,000 North Frisian speakers. While many of these Frisians live on the mainland, most are found on the islands, notably Sylt, Föhr, Amrum, and Helgoland. The local corresponding North Frisian dialects are still in use.

Status

Saterland and North Frisian are officially recognised and protected as minority languages in Germany, and West Frisian is one of the two official languages in the Netherlands, together with Dutch.
ISO 639-1 code fy and ISO 639-2 code fry were assigned to the collective Frisian languages,
but are as of 2006 used only for West Frisian.
The new ISO 639 code frs is used for the Saterland Frisian language also known as Eastern Frisian, but is not to be confused with East Frisian Low Saxon, a West Low German dialect.
The new ISO 639 code frr is used for the North Frisian language variants spoken in parts of Schleswig-Holstein.
Saterland Frisian and most dialects of North Frisian are seriously endangered.

History

Old Frisian

Main articles: Old Frisian

In the early Middle Ages the Frisian lands stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the river Weser, in northern Germany. At that time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. Today this region is sometimes referred to as Great Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage, even though in most places the Frisian languages have been lost.
Frisian is the language most closely related to English apart from Scots, but after at least five hundred years of being subjected to the influence of Dutch, modern Frisian in some aspects bears a greater similarity to Dutch than to English; one must also take into account the centuries-long drift of English away from Frisian. Thus the modern languages are unintelligible to each other today, partly due to the marks which Dutch and Low German have left on Frisian, and partly due to the vast influence some languages (in particular French) have had on English throughout the centuries. Monolingual English-speakers newly exposed to the language would not only not understand it at all, except for some simple sentences, but would likely mistake it for Dutch, or possibly Norwegian.
Old Frisian, however, did bear a striking similarity to Old English. This similarity was reinforced in the late Middle Ages by the Ingaevonic sound shift, which affected Frisian and English, but only affected the other West Germanic varieties slightly, if at all. Historically, both English and Frisian are marked by the suppression of the Germanic nasal in a word like ''us'' (''ús''), ''soft'' (''sêft'') or ''goose'' (''goes''): see Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law. Also, when followed by some vowels, the Germanic ''k'' softened to a ''ch'' sound; for example, the Frisian for ''cheese'' and ''church'' is ''tsiis'' and ''tsjerke'', whereas in Dutch it is ''kaas'' and ''kerk'', whereas in German the respective words are ''käse'' and ''kirche''.
One rhyme demonstrates the palpable similarity between Frisian and English: "Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Fries," which is pronounced more or less the same in both languages (Frisian: "Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.")
One major difference between Old Frisian and modern Frisian is that in the Old Frisian period (c.1150-c.1550) grammatical cases still existed. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the twelfth or thirteenth, but most are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Generally, all these texts are restricted to legalistic writings. Although the earliest definite written examples of Frisian are from approximately the 9th century, there are a few examples of runic inscriptions from the region which are probably older and possibly in the Frisian language. These runic writings however usually do not amount to more than single- or few-word inscriptions, and cannot be said to constitute literature as such. The transition from the Old Frisian to the Middle Frisian period (c.1550-c.1820) in the sixteenth century is based on the fairly abrupt halt in the use of Frisian as a written language.

Middle Frisian

Main articles: Middle Frisian

Up until the fifteenth century Frisian was a language widely spoken and written, but from 1500 onwards it became an almost exclusively oral language, mainly used in rural areas. This was in part due to the occupation of its stronghold, the Dutch province of Friesland (Fryslân), in 1498, by Duke Albert of Saxony, who replaced Frisian as the language of government with Dutch.
Afterwards this practice was continued under the Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands (the German Emperor Charles V and his son, the Spanish King Philip II), and even when the Netherlands became independent, in 1585, Frisian did not regain its former status. The reason for this was the rise of Holland as the dominant part of the Netherlands, and its language, Dutch, as the dominant language in judicial, administrative and religious affairs.
In this period the great Frisian poet Gysbert Japiks (1603-66), a schoolteacher and cantor from the city of Bolsward, who largely fathered modern Frisian literature and orthography, was really an exception to the rule.
His example was not followed until the nineteenth century, when entire generations of Frisian authors and poets appeared. This coincided with the introduction of the so-called newer breaking system, a prominent grammatical feature in almost all West Frisian dialects, with the notable exception of Southwest Frisian. Therefore, the Modern Frisian period is considered to have begun at this point in time, around 1820.

Family tree

Each of the Frisian languages has several dialects. Between some, the differences are such that they rarely hamper understanding; only the number of speakers justifies the denominator of 'dialect'. In other cases, even neighbouring dialects may hardly be mutually intelligible.
It is interesting to identify a migration from German to English via Dutch and Frisian:
zurück (German) -> terug (Dutch) -> tebek (Frisian) -> back (English);
Schafe (German) -> schapen (Dutch) -> skiep (Frisian) -> sheep (English).
It is interesting that the plural of ''sheep'' in Frisian and English (and also several German dialects) is identical to the singular form.

★ West Frisian language, spoken in the Netherlands.

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★ Clay Frisian (Klaaifrysk)

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★ Wood Frisian (Wâldfrysk)

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★ Noardhoeks

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★ South Frisian (Súdhoeks)

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★ Southwest Frisian (Súdwesthoeksk)

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★ Schiermonnikoogs

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★ Hindeloopers

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★ Aasters

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★ Westers

★ East Frisian language, spoken in Lower Saxony, Germany.

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★ Saterland Frisian language

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★ Several extinct dialects

★ North Frisian language, spoken in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

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★ Mainland dialects

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★ Mooring

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★ Goesharde Frisian

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★ Wiedingharde Frisian

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★ Halligen Frisian

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★ Karrharde Frisian

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★ Island dialects

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★ Söl'ring

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★ Fering

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★ Öömrang

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★ Heligolandic

See also

★ Frisia

★ Frisian Islands

★ Frisians

★ Froisk

External links

★ Frisian academy for people, language and culture

★ The Frisian foundation

★ Frisian-English dictionary

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★ Description of language including audio files

★ Omniglot links to various Frisian resources

★ Frisian radio

★ Tresoar - Frisian Historical and Literary Centre